_Communists on Campus_: North Carolina History Websites, Resources, Books

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The Old Man and The Boy - North Carolina History

Considered by some critics to be an Ernest Hemingway spinoff, Robert Ruark’s The Old Man and the Boy (1957) is the North Carolina writer’s most famous work. In it, he remembers his North Carolina boyhood and the life lessons learned from his maternal grandfather
northcarolinahistory.org northcarolinahistory.org

Outstanding book with a Tar Heel flavor.
 
Not an NC history post, but I couldn't find a more relevant thread. So, . . ., does anyone else raised in North Carolina remember: When I was growing up, there was a certain subset of the adult male population who HATED dentists with a passion. These individuals believed with all their mind and heart that dentistry was a scam. And these individuals proclaimed, with pride, that they had: (1) taken a day off from work, (2) gone down to South Carolina, (3) gotten every (remaining?) tooth in their jaw removed, and (4) then got fitted for a full set of dentures to replace the pulled teeth. And then, more often than you would think, proclaim how simple maintenance of dentures were, . . ., all they would have to do was: (a) take them out during their regular Saturday night bath/shower, (b) give them a good scrubbing, and (c) then pop them back in until the following Saturday. And the sons/grandsons/nephews of such persons would speak about this in tones so reverential as to suggest they planned on doing the exact same thing the day they turned eighteen.

And let add, I did not "enjoy" going to the dentist when I was a kid. But never did that level of not enjoying it rise to where I ever considered going to South Carolina, getting all my teeth pulled, and getting replacement dentures.
 

About this collection (Not strictly North Carolina but the Southeast)​

The General Textile Strike of 1934 was one of the largest labor strikes in the history of the United States. Half a million workers walked off their jobs in cotton mills across the South and up the Eastern seaboard, leading some company bosses to respond with violence. Some strikers were killed, others were imprisoned, and nearly all strikers were blacklisted and prevented from returning to work in the textile industry. The effects of the strikes and their consequences lingered in some communities for generations.

The Uprising of '34 is a documentary film, released in 1995, that tells the story of the General Textile Strike from the perspective of those who experienced it firsthand. During the film's production, over 300 hours of interviews were conducted with former mill workers, their children and grandchildren, labor organizers, mill owners, and others who experienced or were affected by the strikes. The recorded interviews are held in Georgia State University Library's Special Collections and Archives.

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission awarded Georgia State University Library a grant in the amount of $121,418 to digitize, transcribe, and make available online all of the interviews, which previously existed only in obsolete audiovisual formats. The digitized interviews are presented here using the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), and open-source software tool designed to make the content of an online oral history more discoverable.

Copyright to this collection is owned by Georgia State University Library. Georgia State University Library has made this digital collection available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

 
New Book!!!

"Despite centuries of colonialism, Indigenous peoples still occupy parts of their ancestral homelands in what is now Eastern North Carolina--a patchwork quilt of forested swamps, sandy plains, and blackwater streams that spreads across the Coastal Plain between the Fall Line and the Atlantic Ocean. In these backwaters, Lumbees and other American Indians have adapted to a radically transformed world while maintaining vibrant cultures and powerful connections to land and water. This reality is paralleled in Indigenous communities worldwide as Indigenous people continue to assert their rights to self-determination by resisting legacies of colonialism and the continued transformation of their homelands through pollution, unsustainable development, and climate change.

In On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice (UNC Press, 2024), environmental scientist Ryan Emanuel, a member of the Lumbee tribe, shares stories from North Carolina about Indigenous survival and resilience in the face of radical environmental changes. Addressing issues from the loss of wetlands to the arrival of gas pipelines, these stories connect the dots between historic patterns of Indigenous oppression and present-day efforts to promote environmental justice and Indigenous rights on the swamp. Emanuel's scientific insight and deeply personal connections to his home blend together in a book that is both a heartfelt and an analytical call to acknowledge and protect sacred places."


Ryan Emanuel, "On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice" (UNC Press, 2024) - New Books Network

newbooksnetwork.com newbooksnetwork.com
 
More Books...

Adrienne Petty, "Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War" (Oxford UP, 2013) - New Books Network

"Professor Adrienne Petty discusses her book, Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2013), about the black and white farmers in the South who were part of the "small farming class," and their evolving strategies for holding onto their land through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The transformation of agriculture was one of the most far-reaching developments of the modern era. In analyzing how and why this change took place in the United States, scholars have most often focused on Midwestern family farmers, who experienced the change during the first half of the twentieth century, and southern sharecroppers, swept off the land by forces beyond their control. Departing from the conventional story, this book focuses on small farm owners in North Carolina from the post-Civil War era to the post-Civil Rights era. It reveals that the transformation was more protracted and more contested than historians have understood it to be. Even though the number of farm owners gradually declined over the course of the century, the desire to farm endured among landless farmers, who became landowners during key moments of opportunity. Moreover, this book departs from other studies by considering all farm owners as a single class, rejecting the widespread approach of segregating black farm owners. The violent and restrictive political culture of Jim Crow regime, far from only affecting black farmers, limited the ability of all farmers to resist changes in agriculture. By the 1970s, the vast reduction in the number of small farm owners had simultaneously destroyed a Southern yeomanry that had been the symbol of American democracy since the time of Thomas Jefferson, rolled back gains in landownership that families achieved during the first half century after the Civil War, and remade the rural South from an agrarian society to a site of global agribusiness."
 
Communists on Campus

"North Carolina's 1963 speaker ban law declared the state's public college and university campuses off-limits to "known members of the Communist Party" or to anyone who cited the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer questions posed by any state or federal body. Oddly enough, the law was passed in a state where there had been no known communist activity since the 1950s. Just which "communists" was it attempting to curb? In Communists on Campus, William J. Billingsley bares the truth behind the false image of the speaker ban's ostensible concern. Appearing at a critical moment in North Carolina and U.S. history, the law marked a last-ditch effort by conservative rural politicians to increase conservative power and quell the demands of the civil rights movement, preventing the feared urban political authority that would accompany desegregation and African American political participation. Questioning the law's discord with North Carolina's progressive reputation, Billingsley also criticizes the school officials who publicly appeared to oppose the speaker ban law but, in reality, questioned both students' rights to political opinions and civil rights legislation. Exposing the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the main target of the ban, he addresses the law's intent to intimidate state schools into submission to reactionary legislative demands at the expense of the students' political freedom.

Contrary to its aims, the speaker ban law spawned a small but powerfully organized student resistance led by the Students for a Democratic Society at the University of North Carolina. The SDS, quickly joined by more traditional student groups, mobilized student "radicals" in a memorable effort to halt this breach of their constitutional rights. Highlighting the crisis point of the civil rights movement in North Carolina, Communists on Campus exposes the activities and machinations of prominent political and educational figures Allard Lowenstein, Terry Sanford, William Friday, Herbert Aptheker, and Jesse Helms in an account that epitomizes the social and political upheaval of sixties America."
 
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